Poems to do with things that happened on, or near, or below
the surface of Portsdown Hill in Hampshire (UK). I lived there during the
1970s, my local pub was the Portsdown Inn. The hill, a long east-west chalk
ridge, overlooks the city of Portsmouth (home to most of the Royal Navy's
surface ships).

Portsdown Hill is a centre of military mysteries; it is
encrusted with derelict and still functioning bases and research facilities
and it is riddled with tunnels, bunkers, cavernous oil storage reservoirs,
sealed up subterranean hospitals, vast bomb shelters and the complex from
within which the allies planned Operation Overlord. It is a place of secrets;
it is a kind of hinge upon which history has turned; it is a place where individual
lives were lauded and made null for the greater good or to gratify the dominant
principle, the hegemony.

Everything in the present tense is occluded, occulted, a
giddy blur; from Portsdown Hill you can only look back into a past filled
with terrors or forward into a view that is equally sublime. Hegemonick
is an attempt to bring the present into focus.

There is a sphere of power—the centre is beneath
the ground—
like a bubble over Portsmouth and the harbour,
its hinterland and marine approaches. It has an edge,
it forms a dome, and everything is washed and rewashed
by radar, the endless monitoring and the chatter within.

from Farlington Redoubt

From the blurb: Hegemonick is a ‘free history’
of the war against children, something unearthed; it is a delusional narrative,
an ode to oblivion; a hymn to the goddess, the once and future porn queen;
a therapeutic journal, partially rewritten; a decoy (but not a plan).

“This is astonishingly powerful writing. The hair
on the back of my head rose. It is a great poem sequence.”
Peter Philpott, Great
Works

Along the way the poems explore the context of the 'Paulsgrove
paedophile riots' (August 2000), they go deep below ground and, although it
might seem odd to some, they go Inside Mary Millington. Mary Millington was
the UK's first shameless hardcore porn star. She was a mighty goddess and
we love her very much. She committed suicide in 1979.

Hegemonick is not a cosy book. It is meant for grown up
adults to read, which means that people on the 'poetry scene' probably wouldn't
like it. If you think you might be a part of a 'poetry scene' don't read this
book.

Hegemonick: reviews and comments

"A creepy journey through sunlight and dampness, ending
in an Armageddon of sorts. This book creates an atmosphere of rare beauty
and horror that has stayed with me for days."
Claire Lewis, International
Times

". . . it is courageous and discerning in its abstract
thought as much as its ventures into holes in the ground or closed military
ruins, in its disclosure of institutional harm at ground level as much as
meticulous detailing of topographical forms which translate into mental acts.
There is a particularly effective long walk in the middle, a release of comparative
calm, cultivating disorientation and vision. It is a passionate writing and
at its heart is the shaping power of perception."
Peter Riley, Fortnightly
Review

"Jordan's poetry obsessively walks and rewalks the
forts, perimeter fences and archaeological sites, recalling childhood memories,
obscure histories and urban myths, as a means to try and make sense of a secret
landscape."
Owen Hatherley, The
Guardian

". . . part-autobiographical about growing up in the
1970s, part-travelogue around militarised Portsdown Hill, part-history, part-mythic,
part-psychogeographical analysis of how our environment (and its secrets)
affects how we think and how the past affects the present. Hegemonick has
the grandiosity of an epic film, full of characters. It is ambitious and hyper-vivid
. . . it is an important, ambitious book."
Andrew Napier, Hampshire
Chronicle (1mb PDF file)

" . . . a richly allusive, sometimes cryptic, and
encrypted poetry that, in spite of its hugely ambitious conceptual leaps and
conceits, carries the attention of the reader through the sheer prosodic accomplishment
and imaginative use of image and phrase . . . Such poetic technique reminds
this reviewer of the levels of poetic confidence achieved in Eliot’s
Four Quartets – albeit with much of the apocalyptic and semiotic attributes
of the latter’s most pored-over melting-pot of avant garde high style,
The Waste Land."
Alan Morrison, The
Recusant

"Jordan engages with topics of political radicalism,
with the damage done to children, with paedophilia - a minefield which most
avoid discussing or negotiate indirectly - with a whole host of dark materials,
in fact, including an astonishing section on the hounding of the unabashed
porn star Mary Millington . . . This is not a book for those of a nervous
disposition!"
Steve Spence, Stride
magazine

There will be a number of readings and field trips to do
with Hegemonick in 2013. Please go to the events
page to see details of these.

Links to PDF downloads of Listening Voice newsletters, previews
and reviews of these events, or other leaflets or documents associated with
them, will also be on the events page
or the archive page.

The Future Shape of Children

Amongst the various elements that underpin the narrative
force and structure of Hegemonick is the assumption that 'globalisation' and
deregulation have fundamentally altered the condition of children. This is
true everywhere of course, but Hegemonick addresses its reader through a ground
that has been 'lost and found', that of Portsdown Hill, near Portsmouth. The
whole is addressed, as well as I am able, through a part.

In The
Future Shape of Children, a notional Everychild, a global citizen, is
imagined within and containing a city somewhere in the UK. This poem explores
the context within which that child lives and the forces at work within and
around it.

The poem is influenced by thoughts I've had about ideas
to do with Ivan Chtcheglov's Formulary for a New Urbanism
(1953). The poem was published on the International Times web site in April
2013.

Hegemonick gets a mention on marymillington.co.uk,
"the official website of Britain's legendary sex goddess". The site,
an online celebration of Mary Millington, is edited by Simon Sheridan, author
of Come Play with Me: The Life and Films of Mary Millington.
The listing, entitled, A Poem for Mary, includes a link to the poem Inside
Mary Millington on the Great Works web site.

Bonehead's Utopia

Poems from a Southern Arts residency at HMP
Haslar, an Immigration Removal Centre near Portsmouth.

In these poems a fictional ‘Haslar’ is imagined
after it has rebelled and declared independence. It is a fairytale state,
an ideal world, a state of disjuncture. It welcomes all — but to what?

" . . . it is political poetry in the most imaginative
and intelligent sense, a deeply philosophical collection of poems . . . "
Alan Morrison, The
Recusant

"From his anger he has crafted a powerful series of
poems . . . it is a genuinely unsettling book.”
Andrew Napier, Hampshire
Chronicle (1.42mb PDF file)

"Jordan is heartening in his subtle assertion of democratic
rights, his insistence that institutions have no right to dispose of the lives
of individuals. The writing is strong, clear, clever and witty . . . It is
more important than anything our so-called leading poets have written over
the past quarter of a century."
Alan Dent, Mistress
Quickly’s Bed (40kb PDF file)

" . . . easy to read, although not necessarily an easy
read. It lingers long after the book has been closed . . . "
Emma Lee blog

Inside
the Outside An article published in Poetry
Review
(Volume 94, No 4, Winter 2004/5)Once on the Poetry Society page, click on the Andrew Jordan
link to download the article as a PDF.

First published in Shearsman
Magazine, two poems :
No Resistance and Working with Narratives: Our New Reality
as the Main ThemeDownload a PDF sampler of Shearsman issue 60 (2004) here.

Bonehead's Utopia readings and field trips

There will be a readings and a field trip to do with Bonehead's
Utopia in 2013. Please go to the events
page to see details of these.

Links to PDF downloads of Listening Voice newsletters, plus
any previews and reviews of these events, or other leaflets or documents associated
with them, will also be on the events
page or the archive page.

Boneheaded miscellany

The Haslar residency is referred to in an article called
It's
just not cricket which was published in The Guardian
on 10th January 2007. The article, which is by Richard Lea, expresses a scepticism
about writing residencies that I find myself in agreement with. As far as
I have been able to see, most residencies and similar such projects tend to
be for the benefit of the 'creatives' who lead them.

Mine was an exception. HMP Haslar went to me because all
the usual recipients had already been funded to create their own 'artist-led'
residencies under a scheme called Year of the Artist. With the Haslar job,
Southern Arts kept the 'artist-led' nature of the scheme a secret. They lied
throughout the setting up of the residency, even arranging a fake interview
(the librarian in the prison, who was persuaded to play along, confessed all
later). It was no consolation to me that I had been picked in advance and
that there were no other 'applications' as no-one else knew about the Haslar
prison project. Although I sometimes wonder why arts administrators behave
as they do, I know there is no point. (See Note below)

What follows are extracts from the Guardian article (my
bits). Robert Potts had already published Inside the Outside, an article about
the residency, in Poetry Review (see above for details);
I did my best to express myself clearly when I spoke to his journo.

The poet Andrew Jordan, who found his only residency at
Haslar detention centre for asylum seekers “difficult and demanding”,
also has reservations. “I think arts administrators like residencies
because it helps them to justify their existence,” he says. “The
whole thing is phoney and writers of integrity are compromised if they get
involved with it. I have no doubt that some good writing comes out of residencies,
but from what I have read, most of it is rubbish.”

“There are all manner of unmet needs among detainees
in Haslar,” he says. “They did not need a poet. They needed interpreters,
advice, information, legal representation and healthcare, including, for many
of them, help with coping with the effects of torture in their country of
origin and the effects of being detained without trial in the UK.”

“Some detainees told me things that were difficult
to hear. I didn’t encourage this as I could see the dangers of playing
the therapist, but it happened anyway. In Haslar, nobody wanted to listen
to the detainees. Some of them really needed to talk to somebody.”

The Equi-Phallic Alliance and Poetry Field Club
contributed Issue 1 of The Listening
Voicenewsletterto this anthology.

"Mind Invaders is a commercially published book that
consists principally of texts that had previously been distributed non-commercially.
This resulted in some glaring contradictions which the publisher found difficult
to accept. For example, a number of texts written by diverse hands are attributed
to the multiple identity Luther Blissett . . . The publishers also disliked
what they saw as the more 'difficult' material I'd included - suggesting in
particular that I might remove a piece by the Equi-Phallic Alliance. I resisted
this and the Serpent's Tail gave way. I am sure they would have been more
intransigent if they'd understood what the piece they found incomprehensible
was actually about."Stewart
Home, from ON THE MIND INVADERS ANTHOLOGY
A talk originally entitled 'Mind Bending, Swamp Fever & The Ideological
Vortext: How Avant-Bard Satire Blisters the Cheeks of the Aparatchiki'